How to achieve all your New Year's resolutions

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.

Clear, James. Atomic Habit (p. 24). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I'm working on goals for the next year. To guide me, I've also updated my high-level vision, a 7-year vision to guide my future goals and intended accomplishments.

I had 10 personal goals in 2024. Here's a quick round-up:

• 7 Goals Achieved or almost achieved (say 90%+).
• 3 Goals NOT Achieved but on which I've progressed well in the year and can still make some progress before the year's end.

I feel really good about this overall progress and have a similar setup for next year's goals.

So, how do I do it? How do I work on so many goals and make so much progress over a whole year?

Let's start from the beginning: how to keep New Year's resolutions.

How to keep your New Year's resolutions

I asked ChatGPT if it had any surveys on people's New Year's resolutions:

• 87% of participants were confident they'd maintain their resolutions
• 9% of them were still maintaining their resolutions by November

The problem isn't just that you're likely to drop your resolutions; you're also likely to believe you won't.

Many things can make us more likely to fail in our goals, and tackling something we have a 10% chance of succeeding as if we had a 90% chance is one of them.

In short: if achieving yearly goals was easy, everybody would be doing it; yet most people don't.

New Year's resolutions are often about building new habits: exercising, meditating, improving your diet, making time for hobbies, etc.

The challenge with these resolutions is not that they're so ambitious that we work hard at them all year long but still don't make as much progress as we want.

Rather, the problem is we don't work on them at all. We lose momentum, we forget, and eventually, we drop them.

To achieve your New Year's resolution, you must know how to build new habits.

And if I could give you one piece of advice on how to build habits, it would be this:

Build one habit at a time.

How to successfully build a new habit

It's typical for you to get to the end of the year with a laundry list of things you wish you were better at.

Gretchen Rubin talks about this in the book Better Than Before, calling it the "Essential Seven":

And changing our habits allows us to alter that destiny. Generally, I’ve observed, we seek changes that fall into the “Essential Seven.” People—including me — most want to foster the habits that will allow them to:
1. Eat and drink more healthfully (give up sugar, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol)
2. Exercise regularly
3. Save, spend, and earn wisely (save regularly, pay down debt, donate to worthy causes, stick to a budget)
4. Rest, relax, and enjoy (stop watching TV in bed, turn off a cell phone, spend time in nature, cultivate silence, get enough sleep, spend less time in the car)
5. Accomplish more, stop procrastinating (practice an instrument, work without interruption, learn a language, maintain a blog)
6. Simplify, clear, clean, and organize (make the bed, file regularly, put keys away in the same place, recycle)
7. Engage more deeply in relationships—with other people, with God, with the world (call friends, volunteer, have more sex, spend more time with family, attend religious services)

Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before (pp. 8-9). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

The "Essential Seven" all seem equally important, and it's tempting to try to improve everything at once, but that can quickly lead to inaction or burnout.

Remember: building habits is hard, and most people fail at it. So, don't make it even harder on yourself by trying to do several at a time.

In the book Organize Tomorrow Today, the authors discuss this incredible concept, which I love: nailing it.

Nailing it means focusing on a single action, doing it for at least 90% of the time over 3 months, and only then adding something new.

In almost twenty years of working with some of the most successful and talented people in the world, we’ve seen the power and the value of focusing on one improvement at a time —no matter what kind of physical and mental horsepower you bring to the table.

Once you’ve nailed your one improvement for three consecutive months (and 90 percent completion is how we define “nailing it”), you’re ready to move on to the next challenge. By doing it this way, you’re actually speeding up the growth process. It won’t all happen overnight, but your improvement will be steady, and it’ll be lasting.

Selk, Jason; Bartow, Tom; Rudy, Matthew. Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 Ways to Retrain Your Mind to Optimize Performance at Work and in Life (p. 185). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

I like to think about nailing as allowing for roughly 1 skip every 2 weeks. Over a 3-month period, it means practicing your habit 54 out of the 60 weekdays.

If you are a top-percentile goal setter and can successfully build several new habits, a 3-month nailing period still allows you to build 4 habits per year – an astonishing amount of progress!

Realistically though, you're more likely to only build 1 or 2 new habits per year, which is still amazing. Remember, the challenge is not starting habits; it's sticking to them.

So you succeed on several yearly goals the same way you build new habits:

By building one at a time and sticking to them.

The long path to succeed on several goals

To succeed on several goals next year, you need to have succeeded on several goals this year.

If I hadn't made progress on any of my personal goals this year, I wouldn't have 10 goals for next year. I'd have 1. Maybe 2.

It's easier to read 650 hours per year if you've done it for several years in a row. It's easier to write weekly on your blog if over the past year you've posted an article every single week.

Setting goals for next year would be overwhelming without these accomplishments, but with them, the goals become manageable.

Think of your goals and habits as a wall you're building, one brick at a time. Your goal is not to build it quickly but to ensure it withstands the test of time.

Getting to the point where you're working on several goals at a time can take years, but that's OK. If your goals are worth it, waiting years to nurture them is far better than not working on them at all.

If you're unsure where to begin, start with the foundational habit:

Exercise.

Exercise: the foundational habit

If you don't yet regularly exercise, that's the most important habit you should build.

There are many tactics for successfully building habits and many great books, articles, and podcasts with numerous tips and tactics.

But the easiest way to start exercising is:

1. Enroll in a gym
2. Choose a consistent time to go

Look, I know some people avoid exercising because they're looking for the perfect fit: they hate weight training, are bored on the treadmill, haven't found a great yoga studio, would rather exercise at home, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I support you – the best exercise is the one that you do. But being sedentary while you look for it won't improve your health.

If you're sedentary today, enroll in a gym. Start with what's available and adjust as you go.

Do the exercise you don't like while you search for the one you do. Think of it as a way to build your self-discipline.

Setting a set time to exercise – morning, afternoon, or evening – is the best way to build consistency.

Some research suggests flexibility leads to higher consistency, but in my experience, a set time every day works better because it turns exercise from a daily decision to something you just do. Most gyms will let you exercise anytime if you can't make it on your set time anyway.

So for your goals next year, if you don't exercise yet, add "start exercising", and do it until you nail it: exercising 90% of the time over 3 months.

The key to achieving multiple goals is starting small and building long-term consistency.

Start with your most important habit, focus on nailing it, and then, if you want, start building a new habit.

Each step forward compounds over time, and success comes not from doing everything at once but from steady progress.

Don't rush it.

Your progress today sets the foundation for your progress tomorrow.